How To Discover Thousands of Profitable Keywords in Minutes Using SEMrush

Have you ever wanted to know which keywords you and your competitors are ranking for?

Do you want to discover thousands of potential long-tail keywords that will skyrocket your SEO traffic?

I got a solution for you.

Meet SEMrush, a popular web application being run by the SEOQuake Team.

SEMrush provides you with massive amounts of SERP data for more than 95 million keywords and 45 million domains. Among its key feature includes AdWords ad copies and positions, Organic positions for domains and landing URLs, Search volumes, CPC, Competition, Number of results, and many more

With this simple tool, you can do so many things. but for our reasons of building niche websites, in this tutorial I will mainly focus on showing you the way I use Semrush to discover thousands of profitable keywords in minutes. Let’s get started!

Understanding The Technique

Let me give you a brief idea on what we will do. Big sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers, etc are dominating the web, right?

And they are ranking for millions of keywords.

Fact: Their high ranking for subpages happens almost naturally because of the massive authority of the root domains. Those subpages have almost zero backlink pointing to them.

And by stealing their keywords, we can outrank them easily by building a high quality site with just a few backlinks. That’s sweet!

Here Are 3 Simple Steps On How To Do It

Step 1: Prepare the weapon

Visit to Semrush.com and sign up for a new account. You have 2 options:

Free Account: You will be limited to see few keywords only.

PRO Account ($79.95 one off for 1 month or $69.95 recurring): I highly recommend this. But if you are on a tight budget, you can subscribe for $69.95. Then, cancel your membership after one month. That’s enough time for you to find some good keywords and enjoy the benefits of this tool.

You can use this coupon code CLOUDLIVINGJOURNEY-K594 when signing up using this link to get 2 week trial.

Step 2: Choose a target

Actually, we can use this technique for virtually any site. However, there are some specific kinds of website that are likely to give us better results. They are:

Web 2.0.

Q & A sites.

Article directories

Forums

Press release distribution sites.

Or any kind of site with user generated content.

If you see a keyword that has one or more of these types of websites ranking on the first page, you’ll have a better chance of outranking them easily. There are tons of websites like these, but here is my favorite list:

[wpsharely id=”999″]

Squidoo.com

Hubpages.com

Ezinearticles.com

ehow.com

about.com

amazon.com

wikihow.com

ask.com

answers.com

webmd.com

[/wpsharely]

That’s more than enough for you to find unlimited keywords 🙂

Step 3: FIRE !!!

Once you’ve registered and subscribed for a PRO account with Semrush, you can now log in.

Now let’s make a keyword list.

For this tutorial, I’ll be using WikiHow.com as an example, so I type the url into search input, then click the big orange Search button.

Then I scroll down a little bit and click Full report on the bottom of the Organic Keywords box.

You’ll see that WikiHow.com are ranking for a total of 2,018,749 keywords. What a huge number!

Now, we are going to filter the list using some certain criteria. Click on the filter button on the upper right of the keyword list. Now we have to set some filters.

You can see that Semrush shows 811 keywords based on my filters. Let’s me explain more on why I use those criteria:

Keyword – Containing – How To Get: When it comes to finding profitable keywords, we should only choose keywords that have commercial intent, and they are usually the ones that contain some specific words like: how to, review, best, buy, benefits, etc. By using this filter, you can immediately avoid all other “bad” keywords.

Volume – Greater than – 999: Because if you type 1000 into the box, Semrush will return all the keywords that have search volume greater than 1000 😀 Remember to always type in a number smaller than the minimum search count you want. For example, if you want to have minimum search count of 2900, type 2899.

Now that we have a list of keywords that meet our ctiteria. The next step is to go through the list and analyze each keyword to find the easy to rank ones. You can read my detailed guide on analyzing the competition as I’m not going to repeat what I have written there.

It’s really time consuming to manually go through the list one by one, so my usually next step is to download the list and put all the keywords into my favorite keyword research tool Long Tail Pro(read my review). It has a great feature allowing you to enter your own keywords.

The job now is much simpler. You can save more time while still being able to find a lot of profitable keywords with a combination of Semrush and Long Tail Pro. They’re both paid tools but I guarantee you that they are well worth the price.

Your Thoughts

This tutorial is quite shorter than my usual. But it’s straight forward and has practical tips, and you can apply them right away. I hope that this technique will help you solve your keyword research problem.

If I were you, I’ll not waste another minute. So go and find your own set of profitable keywords 🙂

If you have any questions or feedbacks, please let me know by leaving a comment.

what a wonderful post, right on time, as I was comparing some keywords tools this week… I have TrafficTravis, SemRush, LongTailPro, Market Samurai and Keyword Canine so far…

It’d be nice to see a comparison chart of them all – or am I asking for too much? 🙂

Anyway, video sites (e.g. YouTube) ranking on the 1st SERPS also show potential low competition, so it’s worth giving a try for those key terms…

That wikihow.com example you gave us actually exposes a ton of new niche ideas we can tackle for a dozen of new niche sites, awesome! I think that’s what makes SemRush powerful, first and foremost, isn’t it?

My Q is this: for how long have you been using this tool yourself and did you see any ROI yet?

Also… how many niche sites is your portfolio counting at the moment? Do you plan to sell any of them yet?

Great post! I never thought about doing this, I can see how you can generate lots of keywords to rank for. When I see these kinds of sites like weebly and such on the first page my mouth starts to water!

If you didn’t receive your commission, please talk with SemRush, and tell the issue… I feel like you deserve to earn that, as David bought it from your link (and maybe he didn’t have cookies enabled, or whatever)

SemRush may understand… this is what my partner does with Aweber, as not always people have their cookies set right, and more than often, let’s face it, most men and women are clearing their browser’s history, URLs and cookies all together…

You have made my evening wonderful and complete with all the rich nuggets you shared in all the articles. It took me a while because I was writing so many notes.

I loved all of the information you offered. I’m wanting to pursue the affiliate marketing and looking forward to getting my own website. Just wrote my first blog 3 days ago and gave away a free ebook per suggestion.

Thanks a million for the great information! I signed up for your new articles and look forward to reading more very soon.